Erland Lee Museum

Adelaide Hoodless came to Stoney Creek carrying a grief she turned into a crusade. In 1889 her youngest son John died of what was called 'summer complaint' — contaminated milk, as the Women's Institute histories tell it. Hoodless, already an outspoken education reformer, decided no mother should lose a child to something as preventable as bad milk and poor domestic training. She threw herself into the campaign for domestic science in schools and helped establish household-science programs — the start of a lifelong fight to put the home on the curriculum. And she talked. Constantly. On February 12, 1897, Erland and Janet Lee invited her to speak at 'Ladies' Night' at Squires Hall in Stoney Creek on the subject of domestic science, to a roomful of farm women — the science of the home, taught as a subject worth studying, which she was already campaigning to put into schools. She was persuasive. One week later, those women were founding an institution.

One week after that Squires Hall talk, on February 19, 1897, 101 women — and one man — gathered at the Lee farmhouse and founded the world's first Women's Institute. Janet Lee had done the organizing, with her husband Erland, who delivered the invitations by cutter sleigh. The meeting elected Mrs. E.D. Smith of Winona as the first president, alongside vice-president Mrs. J.J. Dean, secretary Miss M. Nash, and treasurer Mrs. J.H. McNeilly. Then, as the official history puts it, Janet Lee drafted the institute's constitution right there at the dining-room table — the table that still stands in the house today. The purpose was practical, not political: better homes, healthier families, and an end to the isolation of rural life. It worked beyond anything they could have imagined. Within a generation the idea had spread across Ontario and the country, and within a few decades it would cross oceans — all from a constitution drafted in a farmhouse dining room in Stoney Creek.

And the one man? Local history says it was Erland Lee himself, who agreed to act as chairman — though the museum's own history mentions “a few politically involved husbands,” so the neat lone-man version may be legend-polished.

The Lee farmhouse is a biography in wood. John and Mary Moore Lee raised its log-cabin core in 1808; their descendants kept adding to it — a Gothic Revival front around 1860, a Carpenter Gothic addition in 1873 — until a settler's cabin had grown into a proper Victorian farmhouse. Erland Lee, born in the house in 1864, was the fourth generation to farm here, and his marriage to Janet turned the house into history: together they hosted Hoodless's talk, organized the February 19 meeting, and watched a constitution get drafted at their own dining table. Parks Canada describes it as a Gothic Revival farmhouse and notes the movement it sheltered helped reduce the isolation of rural life. Six generations of Lees lived and worked here, and the house is now a National Historic Site — one of the rare houses famous for what was decided at its dining table rather than who slept in its beds.

Here's the part that should stop you mid-tour: the constitution drafted at that dining table in 1897 became a global movement. The Ontario institutes federated as the FWIO in 1919; the provinces followed the same year with the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada; and in 1929 the movement went worldwide with the formation of the Associated Country Women of the World. Today the ACWW's member societies span 82 countries — rural women organizing around exactly the things Janet Lee and Adelaide Hoodless cared about: food, health, education, and a voice. That's the real arc of this house. Not just a farmhouse, not just a museum — the place where a local answer to grief and isolation scaled into one of the largest women's organizations on earth. The dining table is still in the farmhouse. Stand in front of it and do the math: from one house in Saltfleet Township to 82 countries, in barely a century.